Mirrors and Maps: How the European Gaze Reshaped Religious Identity in 19th-Century Balochistan
The Horse Trader and the Empire Imagine, if you will, the year 1810. A young man named Henry Pottinger is making his way across the arid, wind-swept landscape of Balochistan. He isn’t travelling as a British lieutenant, which he is, but is instead disguised as a horse trader. Why? Because in the early 19th century, this region—stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Hindu Kush—was a "nebulous" space in the imperial imagination, a place where, in Pottinger's words, "a European, avowedly such, could not hope to penetrate." For the next ninety years, a steady stream of British officers, surveyors, and spies would follow in his footsteps. But here is the question we must ask ourselves today: Were these men merely reporting what they saw, or were they, through their reports and maps, fundamentally reshaping the categories through which society understood itself? The answer is that they did both—but the act of categorization itself became a form of creation. ...