April 28, 2002

IN 1881 when the nine-volume Imperial Gazetteer saw the light of day “it was immediately accepted as an authoritative and comprehensive study of India in all the richness of her life and culture”. It was generally accepted that no other country in the world could boast of such a thorough and exhaustive account of its people, society, history and geography.

With the best of intentions this epoch-making publication was out-dated at the turn of the century and stood in urgent need of revision and updating. There was a proliferation of suggestions from all and sundry in England and India. It was one of many ‘chips from an Anglo-Indian workshop’ and represented the overflow of literary activities among the British rulers. Lord Curzon in the closing years of the nineteenth century made his government alive to the need of “encouraging intellectuals and cultural activists to participate in compiling such reference manuals” which according to Hunter proved “more profitable than the conquest of a new province”.

A gazetteer, as commonly understood, is a geographical dictionary incorporating a list of places described with respect to their location, importance, interest (historical and other) and size. It became a recognized form of literature quite early in history as represented in travellers’ accounts of geographical features and various aspects of social, political and economic life of lands and people. Soon these writings were organized in what may be called gazetteers or geographical dictionaries.

A classical example is of Alberuni’s Indica, which is a model of careful observation and scientific analysis. It is unique to a country and is usually published as an official document under the authority of the government in power. For the British rulers, their desire of knowledge was reinforced by the political situation. They were aliens totally unfamiliar with local conditions. Exigencies of administration forced them to undertake the preparation of surveys — general, military, revenue and statistical — in different parts of the country under official and unofficial auspices. The accounts of observant foreign travellers further enriched the stock of information collected through these sources.

During the colonial period writing/revision of the Gazetteer was usually lined up with settlement work. Information was gathered together at grassroots district level by deputy commissioners/collectors and was considered to be an objective and creative study of the people and the tribes inhabiting the area under their control.

Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840-1900) the reputed historian, who also authored Indian Musalmans (1871) was selected by Lord Mayo to organize perhaps the most gigantic literary enterprise that has ever been undertaken by any government. So far back as 1867 the British government had resolved that a gazetteer should be prepared for each of the then twelve provinces of India. The only model before Hunter was an attempted statistical survey of Scotland by Sir John Sinclair a hundred years ago.

To begin with there was no uniformity in the execution of the work and in July 1869 Lord Mayo placed Hunter on special duty “to submit a comprehensive scheme for utilizing the information already collected, for prescribing the principles according to which all local gazetteers are in future to be prepared, and for consolidation into one work of the whole of the materials that may be available”.

This task occupied the next twelve years of Hunter’s life. He travelled the length and breadth of India to establish grassroot contacts and communicate with the local officials and see conditions for himself. No such tour was ever undertaken before. He encountered some opposition and criticism particularly in standardizing the spelling of place-names. Hunter was never discouraged and the “Hunterian compromise based on a transliteration of vernacular names without any diacritical marks was gradually accepted”.

Two years later in September 1871, the new post of director-general of statistics to the government of India was created by Lord Curzon for Hunter which provided him an opportunity to coordinate the entire project and supervize the local editors to finalize the scheme of the Imperial Gazetters. He took upon himself Bengal, the largest and the least known province in India, including Assam. It ran into two volumes and was compiled in 1879.

The other local gazetteers, which were compiled, ran into 128 volumes which added up to 60,000 pages. This enormous material was condensed into nine volumes and the first edition appeared in 1881; and a second edition which was expanded to fourteen volumes, incorporating the latest statistics and the results of the census of 1881, appeared in 1885-7.

All this ranks among the monumental works of reference which the Britishers have left behind. Hunter, of course, did not accomplish it single-handedly. He had encouraged and ably led a team. This landmark publication was the only handy reference book available to the administrator, scholar and the public in all matters relating to life in India.

The hallmarks of the entire work were perfection and accuracy. It incorporated uptodate administrative changes. The indexes of the different series proved to be useful tools to locate specific information quickly from a mass of dense material. The introductory notes provided down-to-earth details on the pronunciation of Indian and Burmese names of cities and places, the monetary system, prices, weights and measures as used locally. The contents were planned to cover physical aspects, geology, meteorology, zoology, ethnology and castes, languages, religions, population, public health and vital statistics and an invaluable index. No other single work would come so handy to young administrators opting or posted to a new province.

After the death of Hunter in 1900, the government of India resolved to bring out an updated edition incorporating the data after the census of 1901. The second edition ran into 26 volumes and included a companion atlas. The task of editorial supervision was shared by India and England. In India Sir Herbert Risley, who was the census commissioner, and in England J.S. Cotton, who was closely associated with Sir W.W. Hunter, were the masterminds directing the enterprise.

The Curzon-inspired Gazetteers of India were published in three series. The Imperial Gazetteers covered the entire Dominion of India, Burma and Ceylon. The provincial gazetteers were mainly compiled and written by census superintendents of the respective provinces. Thus there are three Sindh Gazetteers, published in 1874, 1893 and 1907.

The third series of the gazetteers was targeted at the districts forming a nucleus of complete knowledge on the districts at the grassroots administrative level, as a district was considered to be a unit of administration. These district gazetteers were compiled, written and edited by district commissioners/collectors or settlement officers themselves and were masterpieces of incisive firsthand study of the tracts of land under their control. The District Officers knew the country like the back of their hands.

These district gazetteers were written and published at different stages starting in the late nineteenth century. By and large these district gazetteers are associated with their authors/compilers. Some of them are: Lahore by Oasson Walker, 1891-93; Gujranwala by M.F. O’Dwyer, 1894-95; Gujrat by Captain Davies, 1892- 93; Attock by C.C. Garbel, 1906; Montgomery (Sahiwal) by Patrick Fogan, 1899-1900; Dera Ghazi Khan by F. Cunningham, 1870-74; Multan by E.D. Maclagan, 1901-1902; and in Sindh district gazetteers were compiled and written by J.W. Smyth. He covered Hyderabad, Sukkur and Larkana Districts between 1907 and 1919. The list of district gazetteers mentioned above is by no means exhaustive. Those listed have either been physically checked by the writer or the references to them have been located. We must make an all-out effort to track down all the district gazetteers of the areas now forming a part of Pakistan. They should then be revised.

The only gazetteer brought out by the government of Pakistan in its 53 years of existence was compiled by a retired ICS officer, H.I. Sorely way back in 1968 and under the auspices of the then Board of Revenue, West Pakistan. It is already late in the day and the promised “future edition” should have been out by now. One can only hope that this document will be placed before our information-starved people soon.

The government could constitute a separate cell and the services of retired and serving civil servants and intellectuals/writers of known calibre may be assigned this task on a war footing. It may take ten years to complete this project but it is worth undertaking it.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)