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In his pioneering History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876, 1910) James Fergusson wrote that Colin Mackenzie, whose long career in India culminated in his appointment as the first Surveyor General, "drew everything he found of any architectural importance, and was the most industrious and successful collector of drawings and manuscripts that India has ever known; but he could not write. The few essays he wrote are meagre in the extreme, and nine-tenths of his knowledge perished with him". The vast collection of manuscripts and other material gathered by Mackenzie and his many assistants, especially during the surveys of the Deccan in southern India in the 1790s and 1800s, have been described as "a monument to this day of a kind of historical energy and interest that disappeared almost as soon as the concerns of colonial conquest gave way to the preoccupations of colonial rule" (Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind, Princeton, 2001, p. 82). But the great mass of over 1,700 drawings and paintings in the British Library were largely ignored from the mid-nineteenth century, in spite of Fergusson's admiration of Mackenzie's work, until they were catalogued by Mildred Archer in the 1960s. Howes' Illustrating India is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning scholarly interest in Mackenzie's collection, relating the pictorial records amassed during his long career to other manuscripts, maps, letters and published sources.
Mackenzie came to India in 1783, serving in the Madras Army as an engineer and surveyor....