ABSTRACT
The Gangetic plains were crucial to the making of the British empire. The traverses or route surveys that were conducted between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are useful in thinking through one important concern of the surveyors: scale. Scholarly works on surveying and map-making in India are few, the most important in recent years being Andrew Cook's work on James Rennell and the practice of surveying, and the monographs by Ian Barrow and Mathew Edney. James Rennell arrived in Calcutta in 1764 having already served in the East India Company's ships as a marine surveyor. The landscape resisted representation and with it the notion of colonial progress. The debilitating experience of map-making threatens to throw into question the entire colonial enterprise and its claims to comprehend to see empire as a territorial possession. This slippage between spatial scales and between the notion of time as linear and time as recurrent, is the basis of the ecological uncanny.
