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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