A trading company acquires the revenue of Bengal, and then rather more. Muslin dies, railways arrive, and a Bengali mathematician quietly works out the height of the highest mountain on earth.
13 entries on this part of the floor. 1757 CE – 1857 CE.
c. 1830 CE
Won a battle largely by arranging in advance for the other side's commander not to fight, then helped himself to the Bengal treasury. Was investigated by Parliament, acquitted, and remained unpopular in both countries.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Changed sides at Plassey and got the throne of Bengal for about three years. Two and a half centuries later his name is still used across South Asia to mean traitor, which is quite a legacy.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Dhaka muslin was woven so fine that a full sari could pass through a ring. Company tariffs, forced procurement and Lancashire mills wiped out the trade, and the specific cotton variety went extinct.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Warhorses did not breed well in the Deccan climate, so every southern kingdom imported them at ruinous cost. Whoever controlled the ports controlled the cavalry.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
The mathematician who calculated in 1852 that Peak XV was the highest mountain on earth. The peak was named after a former Surveyor General. Sikdar got a footnote.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
A trading company acquired the revenues of Bengal. Within a decade it was extracting more from the province than it had ever invested in it, and the famine of 1770 killed an estimated one in three Bengalis.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Sixty years of triangulation from Cape Comorin to the Himalaya, using half-tonne theodolites carried by twelve men. The survey killed more of its staff through malaria than through falls, which is saying something.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Victorian Gothic with Mughal domes and stone monkeys on the gables, built as Victoria Terminus and renamed in 1996. Handles around three million passengers a day.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Forced to plant indigo instead of food on his own land at a price that guaranteed debt. The revolt that followed produced one of the first successful mass civil resistance campaigns in India, and a play so incendiary the Company banned it.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
English-educated, employed in a Calcutta office, translating between two worlds and fully trusted by neither. His grandchildren will run the freedom movement.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Played historical kings, rickshaw pullers and everything between, often in the same year, and was the first Indian actor to win a best actor award at an international festival.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
Bori Bunder to Thane, 34 km, three locomotives, 400 passengers and a 21-gun salute. Built to move cotton and troops; ended up moving a nation.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office
A Parsi businessman turned MP sat down with the trade figures and demonstrated, in accountancy rather than rhetoric, that India was being systematically decapitalised. Nobody had made the argument in numbers before.
Find it on the floor: Company Bahadur & the Survey Office