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2019 Barnard Prize Winner - A Nation of Ink and Paint: Map Drawing and Geographic Pedagogy in the American Ceylon Mission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2019

Mark E. Balmforth
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Abstract

Emma Willard's map-drawing geographic pedagogy revolutionized early nineteenth-century American education, turning students into participants in the crafting of the new nation. This essay explores the conditions under which map drawing was transported to American missionary schools in South Asia and helped instigate a Tamil nation in British Ceylon. What did the missionaries intend the teaching method to impart? What were the consequences of this pedagogical form on dominant Tamil portrayals of space and identity in Ceylon? To answer these questions and to track the foreign career of American didactic mapmaking, this essay draws on print and manuscript archival materials, including two maps by a Tamil student at the American Ceylon Mission named Robert Breckenridge. The essay argues that the use of map-drawing pedagogy in Ceylon partially transmitted American ways of being in the world, which were consequential for local spatial knowledges and the crafting of a Tamil national identity on the island.

Keywords

pedagogygeographySouth AsiaTamilCeylonmapsdrawingnationalism
Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 468 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2019

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References

1 Schulten, Susan, “Map Drawing, Graphic Literacy, and Pedagogy in the Early Republic,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2017), 185–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brückner, Martin, The Geographic Revolution in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Nowviskie, Bethany, “‘Inventing the Map’ in the Digital Humanities: A Young Lady's Primer,” Poetess Archive Journal 2, no. 1 (Dec. 2010)Google Scholar.

2 Throughout this essay, I use Breckenridge's scholarship name, rather than Ampalam Katirāmaṉ. The complexities of nineteenth-century ACM mission student identity led to various student approaches to scholarship names that ranged from rejection to a source of pride. We know Breckenridge used his mission name until his death in 1887 and passed the name on to his descendants, some of whom carry it to this day. While use of his original Tamil name might be tempting to emphasize the Tamil aspect of his identity, it would do so at the expense of evidence clearly pointing to his attachment to the scholarship name.

3 To avoid burdening readers unfamiliar with the Tamil and Sanskrit languages and conventions for their transliteration, I have omitted diacritic marks from all South Asian terms and names in the body of the text. Diacritics remain in the footnotes. Transliteration of the Tamil language follows the University of Madras Tamil Lexicon.

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5 Archive collections for the ACM are primarily housed at Harvard University's Houghton Library in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) archives, ABC 1–91, while the majority of ACM archival resources in Sri Lanka were recently digitized by two Arcadia-funded, British Library Endangered Archives Programme grants: EAP835 (https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP835) and EAP971 (https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP971). At the time of publication, EAP835 materials are publicly available on the project's Endangered Archives Programme website (see above), while EAP971 materials are due to be made publicly available in late 2020. For general background on American missionary history, see William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

6 The Commissioner of Indian Affairs's Annual Report of 1836 listed 1,381 students in the schools it funded.

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8 Recent research by Kristina Hodelin-ter Wal has followed the migration of a Jaffna-based identity to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Tamil residents in Malaysia. Wal, Kristina Hodelin-ter, “‘The Worldly Advantage It Gives…’ Missionary Education, Migration and Intergenerational Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century, Ceylon and Malaya 1816–1916,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 31, no. 1 (Jan. 2019), 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 Print would only become common in Jaffna's Christian mission schools from the 1830s, and never consistently circulated through the tiṇṇai paḷḷikkūṭams, which in Jaffna were almost entirely displaced by missionary education by 1850.

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35 In the Tamil language, the doubled consonant “ṇ” distinguishes tiṇṇai (an architectural feature on a house, a veranda) from tiṇai (the landscape schema of ancient Tamil poetry).

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39 Indira Viswanathan Peterson, “The Drama of the Kuṟavañci Fortune-teller: Land, Landscape, and Social Relations in an Eighteenth-century Tamil Genre,” in Selby and Peterson, Tamil Geographies, 60–61.

40 Peterson, “The Drama of the Kuṟavañci Fortune-teller,” 61.

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42 Though we cannot be certain Bethlehem Kuravanci was performed in Jaffna, kuṟavañcis did circulate there, and Cāstiriyār is known to have spent several months in 1811 performing in various towns and villages in Jaffna. See V. Nōvā Ñāṉātikkam Cāstiriyār, Tañcāvūr Cuvicēṭa Kavirāyarākiya Vētanāyakam Cāstiriyār Carittiram [Life of Vedanayagam Sastriar, The Evangelical Poet of Tanjore] (Tanjore, India: V. S. Vedanayagam Sastriar, n.d.), 27–29.

43 Missionary Register (London: L. B. Seeley, 1818), 86. This first documentation that the missionaries were teaching geography in Ceylon mentions that one of the missionaries had a particular interest in the subject, though it does not say who. The mission's minutes from May 6, 1816, reveal Bardwell was made responsible for teaching geography to the Native Free School. EAP971/C1/File10/9. Within the year, Bardwell would leave the mission to join the smaller missionary contingent in Bombay, prior to the mission's transition from Colombo to Jaffna at the end of September 1816.

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48 Mark E. Balmforth, “Between Tiṇṇai Paḷḷikkūṭam and Boarding School: Rev. Christian David and the Transmission of Syncretic Tamil Education to Early Nineteenth-Century Jaffna,” paper presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI, Oct. 17, 2014.

49 “Extracts of Mr. Poor's Journal at Tillipally,” The Missionary Herald, vol. 18 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1822), 173.

50 “Third Annual Report of the Central School at Batticotta,” The Missionary Herald, vol. 23 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1827), 331.

51 “Extracts from the Annual Report of the Mission, for 1831,” The Missionary Herald, vol. 28 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1832), 279.

52 Schulten, “Map Drawing”; Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 11–40; and Susan Schulten, “Emma Willard and the Graphic Foundations of American History,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 3 (July 2007), 542–64.

53 For instance, see Figure 8, from 1907. Also, see The First Biennial Report of the Batticotta High School, 1856–8 (Jaffna, [Sri Lanka]: Ripley and Strong, 1858), 11.

54 Schulten, “Map Drawing,” 185.

55 American Ceylon Mission, The Hindoo Traveller: Comprising the Geography of Hindoostan with a Brief View of its History, Scenery, &c (Manepy, [Sri Lanka]: American Ceylon Mission Press, 1839), 24–25.

56 American Ceylon Mission, The Hindoo Traveller, 25.

57 “Examination of the Mission Seminary, June 1832,” The Missionary Herald, vol. 29 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1833), 359–61; Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1833), 63–65.

58 Young and Jebanesan point to such evidence following a related trial of Western scientific versus Tamil astronomical calculation during an 1829 solar eclipse. They track a shift in the mission from a gradual approach to combating Śaiva teachings to an abrupt and confrontational stance in 1830. Young and Jebanesan, The Bible Trembled, 63.

59 Mendis, G. C., ed., The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon, 1796–1833, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 71–75Google Scholar.

60 Due to space, this essay does not consider the history of colonial maps of Jaffna. On the Dutch mapping of Ceylon, see Abeydeera, Ananda, “Mapping as a Vital Element of Administration in the Dutch Colonial Government of Maritime Sri Lanka, 1658–1796,” Imago Mundi 45, no. 1 (Jan. 1993), 101–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the British mapping of Ceylon, see Barrow, Ian, Surveying and Mapping in Colonial Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

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62 We do not know whether a map of Ceylon or Jaffna was given to the mission or purchased from one of the few figures who owned one in the early nineteenth century. Such an item would have been of great value and, if it existed, would likely have been mentioned in journals or letters home.

63 Letter from Susan Reed Howland, Class of 1839, to Mary C. Whitman, 1939, with map of Jaffna, Ceylon; written at Battecotta Seminary, Aug. 10, 1847. Faculty and Staff Biographical Files, Mary C. Whitman, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, MA.

64 For instance, all three are listed as American Oriental Society members for the years 1846 to 1847. Journal of the American Oriental Society 1, no. 3 (1847), xi.

65 This data was easily accessible to students at Batticotta Seminary in various formats, both in a supplement to the mission-published fortnightly newspaper, Utayatārakai – Morning Star, as well as in the mission's Tamil Geography (1842). Utayatārakai – Morning Star 1, no. 12 (June 17, 1841, n.p.; and American Ceylon Mission, Tamil Geography: For the Use of the Schools, Part I. The Geography of Hindustan (Jaffna, [Sri Lanka]: American Ceylon Mission Press, 1842).

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69 “Extracts of Mr. Winslow's Journal, at Oodooville,” The Missionary Herald, vol. 25 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1829), 272.

70 Balmforth, Mark E., “Riotous Needlework: Gendered Pedagogy and a Negotiated Christian Aesthetic in the American Ceylon Mission,” Review of Development & Change 23, no. 2 (Dec. 2018), 72–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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72 Report of the Uduvil School Committee 1841-(1864) 1875, EAP835/C1/F5/54, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP835-1-5.

73 Schulten, “Map Drawing,” 186.

74 G. D. Thomas, yā ḻppāṇa cutēca [My Country Jaffna] ([Jaffna, Sri Lanka]: publisher unknown, 1948), frontispiece. EAP971/C3/Yalppanasuthesa/6-8

75 See Young and Jebanesan, The Bible Trembled, 101–94; Hudson, D. Dennis, “Ārumuga Nāvalār and the Hindu Renaissance among the Tamils,” in Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, ed. W., Kenneth Jones (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 27–51Google Scholar.

76 Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 130Google Scholar.