Maps and Space in India
This is something I wrote offline a couple of weeks ago and never got around to posting. Wanted to get it up here before I take off. I think it really gives an idea of the different kind of space we're in over here:
Only a week and half before the march begins, we're trying to figure out the exact route and the distances between towns where we might sleep. This involves using maps. Maps hardly exist in India. It's just one more thing that someone like me might assume is a universal tool, only to find that in India it is all but completely absent. I might not have mentioned this before. I discovered it in Mumbai one night when I was trying to get to an internet station just a few hundred meters from where I was standing. I just couldn't figure out the route. I asked a cab driver and showed him a map (in my Lonely Planet book) of the exact place where we were. He didn't recognize it. Neither did any of the three or four other curious cab drivers who came over to have a look. After a few minutes of total confusion, the first guy asked why I didn't just go back to my hotel and go to bed.
No one uses maps or cardinal directions here, but everyone knows their way around perfectly, of course. It's a different way of thinking about a city, or a place at all. It's all based on what's near what. You can see it in the mailing addresses. The second lines of half the addresses in India begin with the word "NEAR", and many include no numbers at all.
So, the other day I tagged along with Rachna to some government offices in search of some maps of India so that we have some clue about how we're going to walk to Delhi. I should introduce Rachna because her name will come up a lot from now on. Rachna is the person here who focuses on the activist side of things around here. She's super cool. Absolutely formidable, in the best way. Apparently all the cops in Bhopal are terrified of her. This is Rachna:
Anyway, I hopped on back of Rachna's motorscooter and we spent about half an hour zipping through Bhopal looking for the local branch office of the Geographical Survey of India. After climbing several flights of stairs in an old government building, we ended up around a table with three middle-aged men looking at some maps of Madhya Pradesh. They said they couldn't help us, though -- that we had to go to another government office [Survey of India] and talk to some other men whose particular specialty was sharing maps with the public. That wasn't too hard to find. A few minutes on the bike:
They were out to lunch when we got to the door. We sat down on the stoop and settled in for a wait. After about half an hour a couple of guys showed up but they couldn't open the office. Finally, almost an hour later, the manager arrived. We went in and sat down in chairs at his desk as if we were going to discuss a home loan or something. There were lots of maps on the wall. Almost all of them looked very old. 1970's fonts. Some of them sported fonts that haven't been widely used in the U.S. since the 30's and 40's. I would have believed anyone who told me these had been printed at about that time:
Rachna explained our purpose to the men behind the desk and asked for a map of Madhya Pradesh. They didn't have a map of Madhya Pradesh. (Yes, that's the state we are in.) Uttar Pradesh (the most densely populated state in India)? No. We ended up examining several other maps. They did have a map of Haryana, the small state to the north and west of Delhi. We will actually be passing through Haryana for a tiny bit, after leaving Madhya Pradesh, nicking a tip of Rajasthan and passing through a good chunk of Uttar Pradesh. This office also had a road map of all of India. Several hours after initially setting out into town, we ended up settling for that. It's not such a great map. The one I bought at a bookstore in New York has the same amount of detail and is a lot easier to read. So that's what we're going to use on the march -- something I picked up on the way home from work in Chelsea. [note: that is the map you see up on bhopal.net, too]
It's really hard for me to imagine how this all works. These maps show almost no detail -- only the big places. Everyone just knows how to get around locally without maps. And most people do not travel far here in India. In Mumbai, Jaipur, Udaipur, and here, I have met only a few people who have ever left any of those places in their whole lives. In Udaipur I was talking to this really nice middle-aged man who spoke English and he had never, ever been out of Udaipur. I felt so weird -- self-conscious, really -- having just zipped from Mumbai to Jaipur and over to Ranakpur to check out the temples and then back again to find myself having this conversation with this man who had never seen any of those places because, he said, it was simply too expensive for him.
Anyway, what I'm trying to convey in this post, I guess, is that the understanding of space, distance, directions, and travel here is fundamentally different than what I am used to, and it makes planning trips a very different sort of thing, too.
I really love the idea of setting out into this terrain full of people and places that no one really cares to map out in any detail -- to maybe have a chance to glimpse at what's right before my eyes instead of understanding it as part of a vast national grid combed over like a well-manicured lawn and perfectly scheduled to the last little detail. Back home in the U.S., it's generally wildest and untamed where there are the fewest people. What's so incredible to me about India is that it is how wild it is everywhere, even in the middle of a city like Mumbai, which has twice as many people as New York City and is just as dense or denser than NYC.
The map we finally settled on -- one I just happened to bring from New York.
Only a week and half before the march begins, we're trying to figure out the exact route and the distances between towns where we might sleep. This involves using maps. Maps hardly exist in India. It's just one more thing that someone like me might assume is a universal tool, only to find that in India it is all but completely absent. I might not have mentioned this before. I discovered it in Mumbai one night when I was trying to get to an internet station just a few hundred meters from where I was standing. I just couldn't figure out the route. I asked a cab driver and showed him a map (in my Lonely Planet book) of the exact place where we were. He didn't recognize it. Neither did any of the three or four other curious cab drivers who came over to have a look. After a few minutes of total confusion, the first guy asked why I didn't just go back to my hotel and go to bed.
No one uses maps or cardinal directions here, but everyone knows their way around perfectly, of course. It's a different way of thinking about a city, or a place at all. It's all based on what's near what. You can see it in the mailing addresses. The second lines of half the addresses in India begin with the word "NEAR", and many include no numbers at all.
So, the other day I tagged along with Rachna to some government offices in search of some maps of India so that we have some clue about how we're going to walk to Delhi. I should introduce Rachna because her name will come up a lot from now on. Rachna is the person here who focuses on the activist side of things around here. She's super cool. Absolutely formidable, in the best way. Apparently all the cops in Bhopal are terrified of her. This is Rachna:
Anyway, I hopped on back of Rachna's motorscooter and we spent about half an hour zipping through Bhopal looking for the local branch office of the Geographical Survey of India. After climbing several flights of stairs in an old government building, we ended up around a table with three middle-aged men looking at some maps of Madhya Pradesh. They said they couldn't help us, though -- that we had to go to another government office [Survey of India] and talk to some other men whose particular specialty was sharing maps with the public. That wasn't too hard to find. A few minutes on the bike:
They were out to lunch when we got to the door. We sat down on the stoop and settled in for a wait. After about half an hour a couple of guys showed up but they couldn't open the office. Finally, almost an hour later, the manager arrived. We went in and sat down in chairs at his desk as if we were going to discuss a home loan or something. There were lots of maps on the wall. Almost all of them looked very old. 1970's fonts. Some of them sported fonts that haven't been widely used in the U.S. since the 30's and 40's. I would have believed anyone who told me these had been printed at about that time:
Rachna explained our purpose to the men behind the desk and asked for a map of Madhya Pradesh. They didn't have a map of Madhya Pradesh. (Yes, that's the state we are in.) Uttar Pradesh (the most densely populated state in India)? No. We ended up examining several other maps. They did have a map of Haryana, the small state to the north and west of Delhi. We will actually be passing through Haryana for a tiny bit, after leaving Madhya Pradesh, nicking a tip of Rajasthan and passing through a good chunk of Uttar Pradesh. This office also had a road map of all of India. Several hours after initially setting out into town, we ended up settling for that. It's not such a great map. The one I bought at a bookstore in New York has the same amount of detail and is a lot easier to read. So that's what we're going to use on the march -- something I picked up on the way home from work in Chelsea. [note: that is the map you see up on bhopal.net, too]
It's really hard for me to imagine how this all works. These maps show almost no detail -- only the big places. Everyone just knows how to get around locally without maps. And most people do not travel far here in India. In Mumbai, Jaipur, Udaipur, and here, I have met only a few people who have ever left any of those places in their whole lives. In Udaipur I was talking to this really nice middle-aged man who spoke English and he had never, ever been out of Udaipur. I felt so weird -- self-conscious, really -- having just zipped from Mumbai to Jaipur and over to Ranakpur to check out the temples and then back again to find myself having this conversation with this man who had never seen any of those places because, he said, it was simply too expensive for him.
Anyway, what I'm trying to convey in this post, I guess, is that the understanding of space, distance, directions, and travel here is fundamentally different than what I am used to, and it makes planning trips a very different sort of thing, too.
I really love the idea of setting out into this terrain full of people and places that no one really cares to map out in any detail -- to maybe have a chance to glimpse at what's right before my eyes instead of understanding it as part of a vast national grid combed over like a well-manicured lawn and perfectly scheduled to the last little detail. Back home in the U.S., it's generally wildest and untamed where there are the fewest people. What's so incredible to me about India is that it is how wild it is everywhere, even in the middle of a city like Mumbai, which has twice as many people as New York City and is just as dense or denser than NYC.
The map we finally settled on -- one I just happened to bring from New York.
posted by Michael M. at 11:47 PM
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