Jesuit mapmaker

Narwar, a small town near Gwalior, was home to one of the earliest European geographers who wrote about India

There is a small town of quite some historic interest not very far from Delhi that I have long wanted to visit but have never found a chance to. I must have passed by it quite a few times but have always taken the other road for some reason or the other. This often happens to places close by. While we are often able to travel to far off places, we keep postponing visits to interesting places next door. Such is this town: Narwar, about 120 km from Gwalior and 40 km from Shivpuri. Many tourists and nature lovers go to Shivpuri travelling between Agra, Gwalior and Jhansi but hardly anybody ever hears of Narwar, though some guidebooks and tourist department brochures do mention its rather ruin of a fort.

How strange that I first heard of Narwar some years ago from someone I met at a secondhand bookshop in Uppsala, Sweden. We were both rummaging through the dusty bookshelves for a gem of a book one wintry afternoon. He looked to me a keen professor type of a book lover. He had built quite a pile of books in German language on a nearby table. I stole a glance at the spines of the books and discovered that several of these were rare 19th century works on ancient Indian philosophy and dharmashastras, that is, classical Indian law. I became interested in him but he did not seem to take any notice of me. Soon, however, I had a tenable excuse to strike a conversation with him. I chanced upon a book in German language, beautifully bound in full, brown calf. I have not studied German language but have over the years picked just enough German words from booksellers to make some rudimentary sense of a title. In this instance, I could not because of the old Gothic Rotunda alphabet used for the title. However, the word “hindustan” printed in large letters in the title and the year 1785 at the bottom were not difficult to spot. It did not take me long to make out that the book was about India, old enough to be antiquarian, and an interesting and valuable work too because it contained dozens of maps and plans of numerous forts. The book clearly had more than one volume because on the third band of the spine was printed a large Gothic “1”. I looked around but could not find any other volume.

I took the book to the professor, now sitting on a stool and scanning volumes from the lowest shelf before him. I asked him in English whether he could tell me what the book was about. He looked at me, and then at the title page I had spread out before him and leafed through the book. I saw his deep, green eyes brighten. “Good find,” he said, “Very good! Tieffenthaler!” He read my face and quickly grasped that I did not know Tieffenthaler from hell or heaven. He stood up, handed back the book and asked, “Where do you live in India?” “Delhi,” I said. “Well, you know Gwalior?” “Yes,” I said. “Narwar?” “No.” “No!’ “No.” It went on like this for a few more seconds till he held my hand and walked me to the shop counter and began on what and where Narwar in India was. He had himself not been to Narwar, though he had been to Gwalior some years ago. “We had a train to catch to Agra,” he said, “And we thought we’ll make it next time but there never is a next time, you know. If you are interested in Tieffenthaler, you must go there, though he is buried not in Narwar but in Agra.”

On the evening train to Stockholm that evening, we sat across a table in the same compartment and during the next hour or so, in a train overcrowded with Uppsala university teachers and students, he told me all that he knew about Tieffenthaler and even Narwar – and he did know quite a lot about both. He said the book of which I had found the first volume was actually a set of three or four volumes. He did not remember exactly how many. His story excited me enough to return to the Uppsala bookshop next day to check if there were any other volumes around but there were none. I was disappointed but not distressed because I felt sure I would get the complete set one day which I did a few years later in Switzerland – three volumes with volume-2 in two parts, so four books altogether. The twist in the story is that I have not read it and I cannot because I do not know how to read or write German and as far as I know Tieffenthaler was never translated into English.

This is a remarkable work composed by the famous Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli on the basis of manuscript papers sent by Tieffenthaler to the great French orientalist Anquetil do Perron, and the calculations of James Rennell, the first SurveyorGeneral of India who drew the first modern, scientific map of India. The work, published in 1785 in Berlin, the year Tieffenthaler died in Agra, is especially remarkable for its numerous maps and plans of the small towns of north India from Almora to Calcutta. All that is fine but what has Narwar to do with it, one may ask.

Well, it was to Narwar that Joseph Tieffenthaler (1710-1785), the Jesuit missionary, born in Austria, was assigned to preach and where he spent a lifetime and from where he traversed almost the entire north India, mostly on foot and to which he retired to after every such long sojurn. A church where he preached, I understand, still stands there

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