Placing Udaipur: the James Tod Collection at the RAS

The Society’s library recently received a kind donation from the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation (MMCF) in Udaipur (Rajasthan, India) of its beautiful exhibition catalogue Picturing Place: Painted and Printed Maps at the Udaipur Court. This exhibition charts how visual representations of topography and territory in Udaipur were transformed during the 19th and early 20th centuries under British colonial influence. The introduction of new European map-making practices looms large in this story.

The MMCF’s gift is a reminder of the longstanding connections between the Society and Udaipur. The Society’s first librarian, Lt-Col James Tod (1782–1835), was the first British Political Agent (1818–22) to the Western Rajput States, which included Udaipur. During this tenure, Tod made Udaipur his administrative headquarters as well as a much loved home. Significantly, earlier in his career (1805–16) Tod directed the earliest western-style cartographic survey of Rajasthan which resulted in his now famous map of the region. But Tod did not work alone. Although Tod personally surveyed several of Rajasthan’s districts, the lion’s share of the work was conducted by two Indian survey teams led by Madarri Lal and Sheikh Abul Birkat. Tod paid heartfelt tributes to these two men in his classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan which, importantly, reproduced the map.

Little is known about Tod’s two cartographic assistants and further research on this topic awaits in the National Archives of India, where most of the correspondence and notebooks relating to Tod’s map making exercise are now located. However, other collaborative endeavours with Indian interlocutors under Tod’s direction are better known. Perhaps the most interesting and productive of these was the artistic collaboration between the Udaipur court artist Ghasi, who was seconded to Tod’s service while he was Political Agent, and Patrick Young Waugh (1788–1829), who was Tod’s subaltern.

When not commanding Tod’s military escort, Waugh was a keen amateur watercolourist who often sketched alongside Ghasi. The Society’s collections are especially rich in the works of these two artists, and it is clear that Waugh greatly valued his association with Ghasi. Waugh’s appreciation is attested by the fact that he frequently inserted vignettes of the two working together in his renderings of the architectural sites they recorded.

For his part, Ghasi was able to adapt his traditional Rajasthani training in the depiction of court and palace scenes at Udaipur to suit Tod’s desire to record the monuments of the region within the European sensibilities of technical drawing and architectural draftsmanship.

However, not all of Ghasi’s drawings for Tod were dry, academic exercises. For example, he sometimes included subtle, visual jokes within his drawings that poked fun at Tod and, he frequently animated his architectural representations with an organic liveliness that belies what an unschooled, European eye might see as an inert stone structure. Ghasi’s artistic vision that recognised no boundaries between the (super)natural and man-made worlds informed the ‘sublime’ aesthetic of Waugh’s own artwork that depicted Rajasthan’s monuments alternately emerging out of or receding into the surrounding landscape.

After Tod left Udaipur for England in 1822, Ghasi returned to the Maharana of Udaipur’s court atelier, where he had a successful career, once again working within a Rajasthani idiom that only subtly betrayed his time under Tod’s patronage. Curiously, after Ghasi returned to the Maharana’s atelier, Waugh appears to have abruptly stopped his artistic endeavours. He died tragically at Shahpura in Rajasthan seven years later after a fall from his horse.

Norbert Peabody

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Those wishing to purchase catalogue of Picturing Place may email the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation at: mmcf@etrernalmewar.in

The Society’s fully restored, limited edition re-issue of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han with a Companion Volume by Norbert Peabody and a full-size, facsimile reproduction of the map (co-published with Yale University Press) is available for purchase at:

For the Americas: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300270525/annals-and-antiquities-of-rajasthan

For the rest of the world: yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300270525/annals-and-antiquities-of-rajasthan