George Grierson’s map and the remaking of Orissa, 1917-1936

In their petition to Edwin Montagu in 1917, the Utkal Sammilani, a pan-Oriya forum, used the Linguistic Survey’s map of Oriya to represent a political and territorial claim to a majoritarian linguistic province. However, for George Grierson, administrator of the Survey, language maps only showed an approximate geography and could not be used to draw boundaries. This article argues that Grierson’s map set off a series of contested cartographic exercises which led to the eventual creation of Orissa in 1936. Initially, debates over a separate Orissa play out through existing maps and geographical data from the LSI and other sources. When the Orissa question is taken up by the Simon Commission, a series of new maps were created which undid Grierson’s cartographic logic and remade the indefiniteness of language into a mappable, bounded province. This article concludes that Grierson was eventually proved right as different linguistic communities continued to resist being left on the wrong side of the line.