A magnificent collection

The book is an able attempt at making sense of the drawings of peoples, places, and monuments which Colin Mackenzie, a Scottish engineer of the British Army of the Madras Presidency, collected mainly from southern India and, on a smaller scale, from northern India, Sri Lanka, and Java, during his four-decade career as a military surveyor in colonial India. The ‘Mackenzie Collection,' reputed as much for its complexity as for its enormity, constitutes the largest and oldest of the extant archives of drawings gathered by a single European in Asia.

Painstaking effort
Jennifer Howes, who set out to catalogue them, realised that it would make little sense unless each item is accompanied by a description and contextualised in the light of Mackenzie's varied enterprises. Given the huge numbers and the bewildering diversity, it was obvious that covering the entire collection will be an almost impossible task to accomplish. So she chose to discuss only certain sets of drawings — those that lent themselves to contextual analysis. The outcome is the book under review, a painstaking effort.

The introductory chapter carries a brief biography of Mackenzie. It is primarily a note on his career, projects, and field staff, prepared on the basis of conspicuously scant data. In the epilogue, Howes speaks of her experience, as she researched the collection, a veritable archive.

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