John Goldingham FRS: Astronomer, Architect and Scentist in Madras

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Goldingham with his two Assistants

The advent of the East India Company and uts military and political domination over India has been the subject of a recent book by William Dreflect detail the inteigues, violence and pillage that accompanied the rise of the Empire, there is another story waiting to be told. The story of men, mostly from Scotland who entered the Company service and spent a good part of their lives in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, historical research and Antiquaran pursuits. The name of Col Colin MacKenzie comes immediately to mind when we reflect on the formative decades of Company rule in India. For very Robert Clive there was a Mark Wilks, a William Roxburgh a Colin MacKenzie and therefore the historical context of early Company ule must also encompass the work of these men who were in many ways the products of the Scottish Enlightenment.

John Goldingham a Fellow of the Royal Society came to India in the early years of the nineteenth century when the great geodesic project like the measurement of the Meridian Arc, the Trignomentrical Survey and terrestrial mapping of India was underway. A practical problem all these projects faced was the determination of the Longitude which could be used to caliberate all their maps and calculations. Navigation on the high seas also depended on the determination of the Longitude as that wouldenable safe sailing. The loss of 4 battle ships near the Isle of Scicylly near the coast of Cornwall and the loss of 2000 sean men made the English Government intervene and John Harrison in1748 succedded in making the Chronemeter that enabled ships to carry the local time with them while sailing.The Longitude is the angular distance between the Equator (latidute) and the Prime Medidian which was the Observatory at Greenwich. Until Harrison invented his very sophisticated Chronometer sailors were at the mercy of the sky, the stars and extremely poor astronomical instruments like the sexton and the qyadrant.Harrison's instument was a robust chronemeter that allowed the Longitude to be determined by the difference between local time(on the sailing ship) and the time in a fixed meridian. Thyco Brahe (1546-1601) and Johhanes Kepler (1571-1630) kept detailed observations os the stellar objcets and these tables were used as aids in navigation. However, navigation by the help of the stars was both risky and with the southern hemisphere becoming the new frontier of exploration with the several voyages of James Cook a reliable method was needed. In India, this meant determination of a meridian that could be used as a base for accurate reliable mapping.

John Goldingham succeeded Michaek Topping as the Astronomer of the East India Company and he undertook extensive work at Topping's Observatory at Nugambakkam on the banks of the Cooum. Being a trined Astronomer, John Goldingham decided to use the Ecpises of Jupiter in order to determnie the Longitude of Madras. He had at his disposal the excellent series of astronomical data collected over several decades by William Petrie between 1787 to 1782. He also had the data of Michael Topping and his own. He presented his method in a lenghty paper in which he discussed the eclipses of Jupiter as a possible determinat of the Longitude on Earth.His findings were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society vol 112 (1822). He cross checked his finding by comparing the result with Lunar Eclipses in which the use of Kepler's table becomes the base for calculation. Goldingham was able to estblish the Medidian for Madras' His Indian assistants perhaps depicted in the illustration above were Srinivasachary and Tiruvenkatachary.

Banquetting Hall designed by Goldhinham before it became ugly

John Goldingham was an Astronomer and he was the first Principal of the Madras School of Survey that grew into the famous Guindy Engineering College' Edward Clive as Love points out in Vlume III of his Vestiges of Old Madras was keen on establishing a distinct Depatment of Civil Engineering separate from the Military and John Goldingham was appointed the Architect to design the Garden House of the Madras Governor and a Public Hall which stands today as the Banquetting Hall after a series of "rennovations" which have altered the character and concept of the architect. Goldingham's drwaing have been presevered in Netehlands and thes structures were meant to proclaim the invincibility of the Company after its victories over the usurper ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan.Lord Clive who was the Governor from 1798 to1803 sanctioned 58,000 pagodas and the Architect was paid a 15% commission giving him a permenant stake in cost escalation. Finally Goldingham was dismissed and the project completed.

After this work Goldhimham returned to England where he died in 1849. Havell suggests that Goldingham was the first architect to use Indian elements in his building a trnd tken forwatd by the likes of Chilsom.

The Redoubt at Egmore: Possible Location and History

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

1733 Map of Madras showing the Egmore Redoubt

Redoubt Pic Story of Madras

The Map given on the left is an important histoical document in that it gives us on overview of what Madras looked like in the first quarter of the eighteeenth century. More importantly, it illustrates the exact location of the Egmore Redoubt: the square bounded area outside the dark boundary lines towards the left top corner of the map. This Map was apparentlydone during the Governorship of Pitt when Madras underwent dramatic expansion. Right below we have the only surviving illustration of theEgmore Redoubt. The location geneally identified with the Redoubt is the Egmore Railway Station on theGandhi Irwin Road, opposite the Archives. This identification which was suggeted by Professor Srinivasachari in his "Place Names Of Madras"which he published in 1936 in the volume of essay commemoration the 300 years of the foundation of the City in 1636.

The identification seems to be slightly off the mark because there are historical documents that when sifted carefully give us a better site.

The location of the Redoubt was outside of the Bounded Hedges that surrounded the East India Company's self procalimed limits of its possessions. There was a Choultry in the place where the Redouby was constructed. And the purpose was strictly military. If we keep these factors in mind we get a better understanding of the location. The documents sate clearly that the Redoubt will have a brick wall around the Choultry in order to lodge such "forces as we shall send to defend peace". While there were frequent skirmishes with Dawood Khan, Mafuz Khan and even on ocassion with the Portuguese, the English faced only one serious contender, the French located in Pondicherry.And the defence of Madras implied guardingthe access points to the City. The obvious attacks from the sea were warded off as Love points out in his Vestiges of Old Madras by strengthening the Sea Gate with heavy weapons. And popular memory has it that the Fortification Walls were constructed with money collected from the Residents of the Black Town, that is the indigenous people and hence the name Wall Tax Road, The attaks on Madras by Dadood Khan prompted Thomas Pitt, whose granson was to become the Prime Minister of England, to seriously consider the issue of defenses.Kanchipuram and and Poonamalee were importantl towns frequently attacked by the Maharattas who controlled the Fort of Ginji and Vellore. Adding to the owes of the East India Company were polegars like Lingappa who commanded considerble armed following in the vicinity of Madras and preyed upon the trade and mechaindise passing through the area. It was during the invasion of the French under Count de Lally that we hear of the military role of the Egmore Redoubt.

The Consultations of the Governor in Council of the year 1710 state that a sum of 350 pagodas was sanctioned for the maintenance of the Choultry clearly a recognition that it was a useful asset. However the location of the Choultry in Egmore presented some thorny issues. Did East India Company have jurisdiction over thie area. Dawood Khan claerly a most colorful figure in the history of the time one one of his visits to Madras with the sole purpose of cadging liquor from the Governor, remarked that if the English came to trade why did they need fortifications, guns and cannon. A question that the Governor parried. By July 1711 a furter 563pagodas was spent in strngthening the Choultry and making it a Redoubt, a masonary fort.Apart from naking it a fort, the Company decided to build a Powder Mill in the same locaton. The reason recorded in the Consultations for the Year 1711 is the poor quality of gun powder available and the erratic supply from Europe which was involved in its usual seasonal conflicts. Brohiers was put in charge f the Powder Mill which was located within the Redoubt. By 1713 a total of 5060 pagodas had been expended on the Fortifications and th Powder Mill. The Redoubt had a dual purpose: to hold the Choultry Plains and was a Signal Post to alert the forces atFort St. George should an Army or Cavalry be seen. If these aspects are kept in mind it is clear that the location at the Egmore Station would have been quite futile to its stated purposes.

We have some other cluse about the location of the Egmore Redoubt in Robert Orme's Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindustan. Wrting about the defense of Madras by Col Lawrence during the invasion of Lally he sates that the Choultry Plain extends two miles west of the Enclosures which bound St Thomas Mount and this plain extends right up to Mylapore. There is a reference to Chindradipettah as being close to the Redoubt and this is obviously a weaving village, chinna tari pettai. And there is a settlement by that name close to where we have located theRedoubt.

The Choultry Plain consisisted of (1) Puddupakkam (2) Chindradripet (3) Roypettah (4) Nungambakkam (5) Triplicane. Egmore itself came under the shifting sands of competing claims and various warlords of the time lid claim to it. The claim was finally setteld when Egmore was acquired by the Comapny.

Given these factors, and the location of the Redoubt given in the Map it appears that the location was much further west from where Srinivasachari located it.

  (This is only a tentative identification as this Historian has not had the opportunity of traveling to Madras and making an on the spot assessment)

Slavery and Fort St George: Does Madras under the East India Company have a Slaving Past

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Reynolds Painting

The Black Lives Movement in the US and across the white world has drawn attention to the enduring legacy of involuntary servitude or Slavery. In Madras, Forst St. George built on a strip of land acquired from the last ruler of the Vijayanagara Empire even as it was losing its elan to the might of the Mughals and their surrogates, remained along with Pulicat under he Dutch, Tanquebar under the Danes and Karaikkal under the French as important centres of Slave Trade in the Indian Ocan Region. The history of the Slave Trade is obviously not a pleasant subject and even the foremost authority on the Europeans Companies in India, Professor S Arasaratnam makes passing references to the prevalence of the Slave Trade. However even a cursory gkance through the Consultaions of the East India Company, Vestiges of Old Madras and of course Madras in Olden Time gives us enough material to begin a detailed study. Of these the last named compiled by James Talboys Wheeler is the most reliable and provides several insatnces of Slave Trade. Even as the debate over abolition was gaining ground in the English House of Parliament, the Court of Directors wrote that the financial problems of the Company stemmed from a "want of labouring people"and the same document states that the Company Officials in Madras were able to procule slaves for their Sumatarn outpost, Benkulen ( Richard Allen, Euroean Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, p1)..

In Love's Vestiges of Old Madras there are a few documents relating to the prevalence of teh Slave Trade and efforts made to bring the notorious trade under some legal framework:
1 An Agreement was signed between the English and the Portuguese authorities to restore slaves who had escaped from the teritories of the contracting parties
2 An Office was opened under the Town kanakkapillai to register slaves at the Choultry Building located on Market Street of Fort St George
3 A document from the Company to Elihu Yale published in Volume I of Vestiges p 546 refers to a need to ascertain the number of Slaves in Fort St George and the Black Town
4 Times of famine and they were frightfully common were times of distress and Children were sometimes sold into slavery with the connivance of Indian middlemen
5 Reference exists of young men and women sold to the Dutch at Pulicat for a bribe of 5 pagodas and the document hints that the Governor Henry Greenhill was aware of the trade and was conniving at it
6 A document registering the affadavit of John Leigh against Kannppa accusing him of procuring children for slavery and sold to "Hollenders" at Pulicat
7 Slaves had to be registered according to a document on p 80, Vestiges of Old Madras
8 "In 1687 the trade was sanctioned under regulation a duty of one pagoda exacted for each slave sent from Madras by sea". Vestiges Vol I p 545

The Slave Trade from Madras perhaps was not on the same scale and extent as the Atlantic Slave Trade but that does not absolve the various European Companies from bearing the responsibility for this Obnoxious Commerce. There were sporadic attempts on the part of Indian rulers to put an end to this menace just as the nayaks of Tanjavur who intervened to check the French Slave Trade at Karaikkal but given the superior military force at the command of the Europeans did not always succeed and also the invasion of Shvaji created extreme conditions of famine in the region and periodic shortages of foodgrain were opportune moments for the Slaving sharks, both white and Indian.

In the interest of Historical Truth it must also be mentioned that after the famous Mansfied Judgment an attempt was made to suppress the Slave Trade, However given the fragmented nature of legal jurisdiction and contesting interpretations of what constituted Slavery, the attempts to suppress Slavery had to wait the Passage of the Slaveru Abolition Act in 1834. After that the Royal Navy dployed a ship, an old Steamer for search and seizure of Arab and other ships involved in the Slave Trade. A series of treaties were signed with the sultans of Muscat, Zanzibat, Oman, the Immam of Mecca and a number of local chiels along the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to ensure compliance of the treaties. The Jeddah Massacre of Europeans in 1858 may be linked to the resntment felt against what the Arabs regarded as legitimate commerce.

Take a close look at the painting above. It was painted by Reynolds and depicts Clive with his daughter. You will find a dark Indan face in the painting. Such traces do exist in addition to the documents ; It is high time for Indian historians to wean themselvs away from the garbage of Post Colonial theories and adopt rigorous time tested methods of Historical Research,

Charles Umpherston Aitchison Administrator, Diplomat Historian (1832-1896)

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The Victorian Age was replete with monumental historical projects like the History of the Parliament, Calendar of State Papers, Victoria History of the Counties of England and witnessed prodigious publication of Historical records. Stubbs and Maitland were keen investigators of Anglo Saxon political institutions, particularly in the two centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066 AD. In India too the British adopted a similar policy either to fends off challenges to their regime in the post Mutiny era when India was taken over by the Crown or as a intervention in preservation of Historical Documents and this project is associated with Charles Umpherston Aitchison. He was the Foreign Secretary of India, the first "President" of the Public Service Commission, the precurson of the UPSC and he was appointed to the Covenanted Civil Service soon after the Compettitive examinations were introduced and so was a pioneering competition wallah. Apart from these disctinctions, he was also the Lt. Governor of the Punjab and was closely associated with Sir John Lawrence.

C U Aitchisons

Charles Umperston Aitchison was born in Scotland in 1832 and was educated in the University of Edinburgh like the others we have studied in this series: William Roxburgh. He graduated with a Masters' degree in what was then quaintly described as Moral Philosophy and he was the only candidate selected from Scotland for appointment in the Covenenated Civil Srvice in India. His first appointment was inHissar in May 1857 but was providentially transferred to the Punjab and hence escaped the massacre that followed the Mutiny in May 1857, He was in Lahore when the Mutiny began. After the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, Aitchison was sent to Calcutta where he worked as an Under Secretary in the "Political Department".

The Mutiny was a turning point in Indian History in that it represented a significant movement towards national aspiration, although in an incohate fashion. For the English it was a moment of reckoning in that the violence that they had seen expereinced at the hands of their beloved "natives" was on a scale that shook the foundations of the political order that bound India to England or Great Britain as it styled itself then. And it is here that the work of C U Aitchison is reembered.

Historians have seen the rise of the East India Company to politcal and military power as a consequence of the decline of the Mughal Empire. The Treaty of Allahabad signed in 1765 merely ratified an pre existing reality. But in the "Narrative" part of his XIII volume Treaties, Sanads and Engagemets, a different and more sophisticated understanding of the process of territorial conquest of India is developed. We can call that process: Conquest by Treaty. Nearly 2500 individual documents are found over the XIII volumes that for some strange reason continued to be published under the editorship of C U Aitchison even after his death. The conflict between Paramountcy and So vereignty  lay at  the heart of this gigantic venture. Was the status of the East India Company in India until its takeover by the Crown in 1858 that of a Sovereign or the Paramount Power. The East India Company like any corporate body derived its charter to trade from the English Parliament but by the middle of the eighteenth century had transformed itself into a major political and military power largely on the strength of its huge land army and deft diplomacy. And the net result were Treaties which were signed by the Company with major political powers of the indigenous people like the Nizam, the State of Mysore, the states of Rajputana, the states of Central India etc. In most of these cases the Subsidiary Alliance from the time of Warren Hastings meant the accptance of a "Resident" and a detachment of Company forces which were o be maintined by the states in hih they were deployed.  Sannads were of a different order. They were documents issued by the Paramount Power in reply to or in response to an existing situation or dispute on the ground. The right of succession to the Gaddi was usually recognized through the grant of a sannad bearing the seal and signature of the Company. Engagments is a dubious category. Salt manufature, fishing and custom duties, forest grazing rights, native customs and practices were all governemed by the term Engagement. The English Administration both during the reign of the Company and the Viceroys communicated with "Native Chiefs" through the Political Department and it raises the question whether the Administartion then considered Natice chiefs to be "sovereign" entities. This question also has bearing on the later political history of India in that when the Transfer of Power took place in 1947 all the 616 entities that constituted the fabric of India became at one fell stroke "Independent"'.

C U Aitchison collected the documents which were widely dispersed in various territories and offices of the then regime and published them in order to demonstrate the legal validity of English authority to govern. The English Administration was particular that they nested and varying degrees of Sovereignty did not clash with the authority to governern India. And the Administration was based on consent in the strictly political sense in that it rested on the Treaty signed between the Native States and Princely States. The latter was a category that emerged only after the 1911 Durbar.

In the late nineteenth century, a major shift took place in the strategic thought that influenced the British policy in India. The security of India resided not only in the capability of defence on land but also the ability to intervene in the wide maritime worls stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Mlacca, a vision most eloquently articulated in Lord Curzon's celebated Address to the Royal Geographical Society, London and a vision whose wisdom in only now being understood after 70 years of neglect. Hence the Engagments with the Sultans of the decaying Ottoman Empire on the Gulf were brought into the imperial horizon: Muscat, Aden, Zanzibar and host og Arab sultans signed agreements including the Emir of Kuwait, a document they used to demonstrate their Independence when Saddam Hussein invaded the territory.

C U Aitchison was appointed President f the Public Service Commission in 1886 and he reccomended the establishment of the Imperial Civil Service, the nomenclature of which was changed to the IndianCivil Service. He also took interest in establishing educational insitutions in the Punab and the Aitchison College in Lahore is a good example. Upon his return to England he was created Knight Commander of the Star of India and he died in 1896.

Indian diplomats who have to answer challenges from a vaiety of different sources have to dpend heavily on Sir Aitchison's monumnetal work including the challege over Sir Creek.