ABSTRACT
The foregoing implies that the geography and topography of spaces of circulation change historically. Knowledges and their meanings and values are thus made and perpetuated within the relationships of social groups. These spaces are physical in that they pertain to specific places or regions, and are at times identified by geographical, religious, or linguistic epithets: for example, the English aristocracy, Parisian intellectuals, Gujarati merchants, Jewish merchants, and Latinized literati. The collaboration between Britons and South Asians progressively broadened to include tax collection, administration of justice, and, finally, education. It also broadened toward the sciences, such as linguistics, land surveying, and cartography. The newly instituted colonial administration saw the survey of navigable rivers as of prime importance. As the historian of medieval and early modern India, Muzaffar Alam, has argued, ever since the sixteenth century, many Sufi traditions sought to provide a doctrinal basis for a religious, cultural, and political synthesis between Islam and Hinduism.
