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Not recalled here still
S. MUTHIAH
I'VE JUST heard that 200 years of mapping in India, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, is to be celebrated in Britain from July 12 till January 7 next year as an `Indian Festival of the Great Arc.' That's a festival that started in Delhi and Dehra Dun on April 10, last year, on the day Captain William Lambton - his colonelcy still a long way in the future - began his epic work, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (Miscellany, May 20, 2002) 200 years ago. Since last year, there's been talk of celebrating the event in Madras - from where the survey began, proposed and headed by a soldier from the Madras cadre. But there's been little more than that since.
Lambton's survey began at St.Thomas' Mount - and a statue of him to commemorate that first step has been mooted, but sculpting of it still seems some time away. The point where the survey began has, it is reported, been identified on St.Thomas' Mount - but even that still seems to have an air of doubt about it. And a whole heap of programmes to be part of a year-long celebration in Madras had been suggested - but does not seem to have gone much further than the preparatory stage. Meanwhile, the first celebration outside Delhi - home of the Ministry of Science and Technology - and Dehra Dun - headquarters of the Survey of India, which Lambton's work led to - are to be in the U.K., but not in Madras where it all started.
Part of that celebration in the U.K. will be The Great Arc Exhibition, designed by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and a film documentation. I wonder when they will be seen in the place where the GTS originated, Madras. I wonder too, whether anyone in authority here, in government or academia, is really interested whether the celebration is held here or not, given the low priority we give to heritage.
Meanwhile, I know of at least one person, T.S. Subramaniam, who has been scrambling up hill and down to find markers of that survey in Madras. St. Thomas' Mount has provided a likely marker that is being speculated over, as inscription on it there's none. Certainly, the base of the marker of Lambton's starting point, near the church in a southwesterly direction, was in place in 1885/6 but had vanished by 1915, according to a Survey of India document of the time. A GTS station mentioned in the same report as being "on the southwest wing of the Parry Building" could not have been in Dare House (built 1939-41) and may not have even been in the old Parry Building, which was developed after a Nawab of Arcot property here was bought by Parry's in 1803 and later developed. And GTS stations mentioned at Red Hills and Injambakkam have disappeared. All that remains as a memorial to Lambton's work is a 15-foot tall granite pillar in the Regional Meteorological Centre, Nungambakkam, which is not a GTS station, and a GTS benchmark a few metres away.
The inscription on the pillar, in English, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and Latin reads: " (1) The Geodetic position (Lat. 13º 4'3" 0.5 N, Long 80º 14'54" 20 E) of Col. William Lambton, primary original of the Survey of India fixed by him in 1802, was at a point 6 feet to the south and 1 foot to the west of the centre of this pillar. (2) The centre of the meridian circle of the Madras Observatory was at a point 12 feet to the east of the centre of this pillar." This inscription is believed to have been cut after astronomer Michie-Smith had made the final longitudinal determination on Madras in 1892. Which makes me wonder whether this was a marker that was originally on St. Thomas' Mount and was moved to what was then the Madras Observatory, before that institution moved to Kodaikanal in 1899 and left Nungambakkam to meteorology. Be that as it may, that is the only place in Madras where Lambton is remembered - and that, at a time long before what he started was called one of the greatest scientific achievements of the modern world.
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