Kasturbhai Lalbhai Memorial Lecture: Before colonial surveys, Jain scholars shaped Gujarat’s mapping traditions: Historian Samira Sheikh

“Histories of religion and histories of art and science have all been placed into different buckets and they don’t talk to each other. I challenge that,” she said.

Her lecture, Mapping the Land, Mapping the Skies, revisited Jain traditions of astronomy (jyotiḥśāstra), mathematics and cosmography, placing them alongside Islamic and later European techniques. Rather than viewing Indian cosmographic diagrams as purely devotional art, she argued they must be understood as part of a broader spatial knowledge system.

“When westerners see these, they say these are not maps. Western cosmographies can be maps, but Indian cosmographies? No, they are not maps. These are religious philosophical diagrams. They have nothing to do with actual mapping of the world,” she said.

At the centre of her argument was Mahendra Suri, a 14th-century Jain scholar from Bharuch who composed the Yantrarāja, the first Sanskrit treatise devoted to the astrolabe — an astronomical instrument used to determine time, bearings and latitude on land or sea. The astrolabe had circulated widely in the medieval Islamic world. Sheikh noted that Mahendra Suri translated and adapted Arabic materials into Sanskrit verse while working in the Delhi Sultanate court.

Quoting historian Asad Q. Ahmed’s reading of the text, she said: “The westerners have been using this incredible instrument. And now it has come to us and so I am going to explain to you the ways in which it works and the ways in which it could be used for our purposes.”

Sheikh pointed to a 1605 astrolabe made in Ahmedabad during the reign of Jahangir, inscribed in Sanskrit, as evidence that such scientific practice was sustained locally. Its production required collaboration across social groups.

“Your Jain muni is not going to make the astrolabe with his own hands. You need specialist craftspeople,” she said, referring to Kansara brass artisans.

On the 17th and 18th centuries, Sheikh cited material evidence of practical cartography in Gujarat. “The first map was drawn in around 1730… this is a map of the Gulf of Cambay,” she said.

Explaining its function, she added: “Those are all numerals written in Devanagari with fractions. So, fourteen and a half vāṁ — vāṁ is a fathom,” describing how the map recorded sea depths essential for navigation across the Gulf’s shifting sandbanks.

She also discussed a large late Mughal map of Gujarat that she suggested was produced shortly before the Maratha capture of Ahmedabad. The map’s emphasis on rivers, wells and canals, she argued, reflected administrative priorities.

“By showing this bright shining beautiful land of Gujarat, my argument is that the last Diwan of Mughal Gujarat is saying everything is okay. This is stable. We are still doing our thing. We are still keeping this land safe for the Mughal Empire. But in actuality, it is made only because it is unstable. It’s a huge piece of propaganda,” she said.

According to her, such examples complicate the idea that pre-colonial India lacked practical mapping traditions. While the Mughals did not maintain a permanent cartographic workshop comparable to some European states, spatial knowledge circulated through mercantile and scholarly networks.

“In India, the only market that stands to benefit from maps is pilgrimage maps,” she said, arguing this as a reason for the lack of maps being developed widely by authorities and noting that other varieties were often kept within communities as privileged knowledge.

Sheikh framed Gujarat as a “crucible” of sustained cross-pollination, where Jain suris, Brahmin astrologers, Muslim scholars and artisans operated within shared urban spaces. Rather than rupture, she described successive moments. These range from the adoption of the astrolabe to the incorporation of European cartographic conventions, as instances of selective adaptation.

In closing, Sheikh suggested that institutions such as the L D Museum stand as contemporary reminders of this layered intellectual history. “The story of mapping the land and mapping the skies and mapping the seas in Gujarat… is one of layered coexistence,” she said, pointing to a past in which scientific, devotional and administrative knowledge were not siloed but intertwined.

(Nishant Bal is an intern at the Ahmedabad office of The Indian Express)